This site uses cookies, for analytic purposes and to provide enhancements to the user experience. If you click the "Accept Cookies" button, you can continue without further intrusion. Otherwise, you can click the close button at upper right to hide this notice, but your use of this website may be impacted. For more information visit our Privacy Policy page.

Home / Blog

In Memory Of John Perry (April 9, 1929 - December 4, 2016)

---John Perry: one of the 2000 haikus from Textes, a book of haiku which John composed in his last four years of life

So I’ll spell it out: John Perry died a year ago this month.. John was a terrible critic (“Looks done to me!”) but a wonderful support (“Time to go upstairs; what should I read today?”) For in fact, a painter’s mind is often a burden: left to its own devices, it drifts into dismal distractions, hoping perhaps to escape the risky business of creation. (“isn’t it time to shop for dinner?” “Did I remember to take out the garbage?”) And John’s reading aloud of favorite stories or new fiction while I worked kept my anxious mind away from the terrors of paint application. There is a story about the French writer Colette, whose husband was said to lock her in her room, so that production of the wherewithal needed to buy groceries could proceed on schedule. (And then there was Virginia Woolf’s hypothetical Sister of Shakespeare who had no room!) This painter has been very lucky. She plans to take advantage of the many privileges left to her and aspires to keep the easel—and this blog—supplied with nourishment for eyes and mind. John’s spirit still fills the studio. The painter hopes to enlist his ghost to fire up her brushes.